Relative audience retention

The standard retention curve shows the shape of your own drop-off. This one plots that shape against a benchmark drawn from videos of comparable duration across the whole platform, so you can see where you sit. Above the line, you hold viewers better than the typical video of that length at that point. Below it, you do worse. The report needs a certain amount of watch data before it appears at all, which is why new or low-view uploads often show nothing. Its use is separating a real problem from the normal shape of the format: a steep fall in the first thirty seconds looks alarming on its own, and unremarkable once you see that almost every video of that length does the same.